Overview Of Into The Wild By Jon Krakauer

Impartiality can be defined as “not partial or biased; fair; just” (Dictionary.com). When biographers tell someone else’s story, they often struggle to maintain impartiality. A biography will rarely be, if ever, a collection of truths in its entirety with no mention of opinion. A biographer can simply not remain completely neutral. Like many others before him and many following as well, Jon Krakauer clearly fails to hit the mark of impartiality.
Biographers struggle with remaining neutral because everything people create is influenced by who they are, including their opinions. Even a biographer’s diction is because of their stance on the topic. A person’s writing is practically saturated in their beliefs until the reader can't help to be

Krakauer shows evidence of this in chapters 14 and 15 of Into The Wild when he uses these chapters to compare and contrast himself from Chris McCandless. The biographer touches heavily on their common ground, including unfortunate family history. Indeed, throughout later chapters of the book, Krakauer allows his audience a glimpse of what he believes to be true of McCandless and his unfortunate demise, particularly when he states, “When the adventure did indeed prove fatal, this melodramatic declaration fueled considerable speculation that the boy had been bent on suicide from the beginning, that when he walked into the bush, he had no intention of ever walking out again. I’m not so sure, however”(Krakauer 134). Consequently, this writing style is far from unbiased and continues to prove the idea that biographers cannot maintain

They want their beliefs to be validated and for people to understand their point of view. Krakauer spends most of Into The Wild trying to treat Chris’s hegira as neutrally as possible. However, he does give warning from the very beginning, noting, “I won’t claim to be an impartial biographer” (Krakauer). When Krakauer finally reveals his thoughts on McCandless’s journey, he does so almost hesitantly, but forges on because he feels that it must be heard. Krakauer truly believes that he understood Chris’s struggles, that he has invaluable insight into McCandless’s Alaskan endeavor. He enforces this from the beginning, stressing in the author’s note, “But let the reader be warned: I interrupt McCandless’s story with fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless”(Krakauer). Furthermore, it could even be said that Krakauer’s opinion is an essential piece of Chris’s puzzle. Readers are better able to comprehend Chris’s difficulties when they have Krakauer’s knowledge and thoughts as a guide. This may be a major component to Krakauer revealing his thoughts as he